J. A. Leo Lemay, ed.: Benjamin Franklin: Writings. New York: Library of America, 1987.
Esmond Wright: Franklin of Philadelphia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
This essay combines two reviews, the first published originally in the Washington Times, the second published originally in the New York City Tribune, August 12, 1987.
While pioneering the Sisyphean task of explaining Americans to the French, Benjamin Franklin wrote that, given “the most general Mediocrity of Fortune that prevails in America, obliging its People to follow some Business for Subsistence, those Vices that arise usually from Idleness are in a great Measure prevented. Industry and constant Employment are great Preservatives of the Morals and Virtue of a Nation.” In addition, he observed, “serious religion under its various Denominations, is not only tolerated but respected and practiced,” so that “persons may live to a great Age in that Country without having their Piety shock’d by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel.”
Serious work and serious religion, both associated with middling economic and social conditions reinforced by a sameness of opinions (called ‘cohesiveness’ by friends, ‘conformity’ by critics)—these traits still persist in what we now call ‘Middle America,’ despite some noticeable softening in the last twenty-five years. The softening of the middling virtues, the ones that ‘made America great,’ as orators used to say, weakens the political regime, in turning threatening the civil, intellectual, and religious liberties protected by the regime.
Love and fear soften the middling virtues. Work and religion rechannel these passions, but the very success of hard work brings idleness, which brings back love and fear: In America sexual liberation and the fear of war, equal components of ‘Sixties radicalism, brought first disorder, then inertia. Benjamin Franklin saw that love and war pose the challenges to the good ordering of human life as he conceived it.
“Neither a Fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parley,” says the eponymous narrator of “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” collected in this handsome new Library of America collection of Franklin’s writings. The regime of liberty depends upon protecting certain areas from public discussion and therefore from popular action. “The proof of gold is fire; the proof of woman, gold; the proof of man, a woman.” No other American Founder would have said that, but Poor Richard does. Although celebrated for his humorous defense of amours with older women (“in the dark all cats are grey,” but older ones purr more), Franklin consistently defends marriage, “the Cause of all good Order in the World.”
But he does not defend it as an institutional embodiment of love. No, love is a notion he surely would regard as chimerical in all but odd cases. Marriage at best is a friendship, defined unambitiously by Poor Richard: “There are three faithful friends, an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.” Marriage requires prudence, not passion (“Keep your eyes open before marriage, half shut afterwards”). It seems that “One good Husband is worth two Wives; for the scarcer things are the more they’re valued,” and thus successful marriages usually depend upon the forbearance of women.
One of the newly attributed writings of Franklin appearing in this volume is “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” written in 1730. Women are its intended audience, but the deferential wife commended therein (“study his Temper and command your own”; “avoid, both before and after Marriage, all Thoughts of managing your Husband”) could not survive, intact, either the libertarian or the egalitarian thrusts of liberal democracy. The famous twinkle in Franklin’s eye may have reflected some intimation of this, but he did not think it through.
He did, however, think through the problem of war. He never fought in one, preferring to parley. “In my opinion,” he once wrote, “there never was a good War, or a bad Peace.” Franklin’s strong anti-war sentiments are well-known, and they comport with his fondness for commerce, religious toleration, and above all for “philosophy”—the quiet practice of useful science, including “The Science of Virtue,” as he called it in the one Socratic dialogue he wrote. But he never ran to the extreme of pacifism. He spent much of his early political career opposing the Quakers of the Pennsylvania Assembly. As Poor Richard advises, “Love your Neighbour; yet don’t pull down your hedge.”
One of the most brilliant (and prescient) of Franklin’s essays is entitled “The Jesuit Campanella’s Means of Disposing the Enemy to Peace.” Here Franklin outlines how an enemy may be divided and conquered by a “warre of words” in which the target nation’s own writers, clergy, “rich men,” academics, women, and “great Statesmen whose natural spirits be exhausted by much feasting,” will gull “the simple and undiscerning many” with cries of “Peace, Peace, Peace.” Franklin would use the realism, and particularly the suspiciousness of the commercial mind, ever alert to swindle, to toughen it against its own tendency to compromise on everything, to talk itself into abandoning its fortresses.
Christianity, that grand synthesis of the spirit of love and the spirit of war, attracts Franklin’s judicious attention. He praises Christianity while artfully rechanneling its energies toward less volatile practices. (Poor Richard bursts into song: “To lead a virtuous Life, my Friends, and get to Heaven in Season,/You’ve just so much more need of Faith, as you have less of Reason.“) Much more than we his inheritors do, Franklin saw that love and war must be conceived in a new way in order to support the regime of liberty. Only then does a certain piety make sense: “God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my Country.” Absent this universal love and knowledge, prudent men must keep up their defenses, in private life and public.
In view of Franklin’s art of defense, who and what was he? Considering Edmond Wright’s biographical account, Franklin comes to light as a self-made man who invited everyone he met, personally or through his writings, to lend a hand in the making. This accounts for some of the fascination with him, and some of the disagreements about him.
He managed both uniqueness and typicality, to be individual and to the individualist. Tell me your feelings about him, and I will know what you feel about the bourgeoisie—businesslike, affable, adaptable to and adaptive of circumstances, shrewd, patriotic but given to internationalist dreams, respectful of religion but undevout, inventive, of middling morals, surer of means than of ends, somewhat libertarian, ambitious, sincerely aspiring to virtue and even more to the respectability the reputation for virtue brings.
Franklin pushed embourgeoisement to the point of genius. But as genius is not itself bourgeois, we do not exhaust him by saying, as Wright does, “He as completely and avowedly bourgeois.” Wright himself produces contrary evidence: “son-in-law Richard Bache’s memory of him was that life seemed always—at least on the surface—to be a great joke”; yet he could write to his sister Jane, “this world is the true Hell.” Neither the irony nor the pessimism add up to the Compleat Bourgeois taking this life seriously but not desperately. They suggest rather a man with insights transcending the limits of social class.
An Epicurean, then? One who glimpses chaos beneath the surface, sees the horrors of it, and prudently steps back to enjoy the surface with as much refinement as he can cultivate? But Franklin was no Epicurean in the classic sense, and not exactly one in the vulgar sense. As Wright observes, he lacked “the aesthetic sense,” preferring utility to the beautiful and the speculative. (Franklin on Deism: “I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho’ it might be true, was not very useful”). As for vulgar Epicureanism, Wright admits the man enjoyed his squab and madeira, but suspects his “venery” to have been exaggerated: “Probably it was the words and not the deeds that were bold.” More, a distinguished public career precludes any serious Epicureanism, however defined.
“Was there,” Wright asks, “a ‘real’ Franklin?” There was, but he was a man more readily captured by the historian’s narrative than by philosophic definition. He moved prudently with shifting circumstances.
His trade, printing, enabled him to educate himself by reading widely and writing voluminously. Like all editorialists, he “began as a moralist, concerned with good conduct”; works instead of faith, action instead of thought, “the mastery of books as tools and weapons” not guides and teachers, interested him from the beginning. The morality he derived from Boston of the 1710s was a decidedly secularized Puritanism—more at home, it transpired, in tolerant, polyglot Philadelphia, where taverns outnumbered churches by ten to one.
Franklin established America’s first circulating library in 1731: “there were more titles by [John] Locke than by any other author.” That is a revealing datum. A materialist of dubious faith but with a prudent regard for pious opinion, Locke formulated a modern, that is to say among other things active, Epicureanism—one encased insobriety and even some public spiritedness. “Utility for Franklin was never forgotten,” and in this he followed Locke. To Franklin, “philosophy” meant applied, useful, science. “For him politics was not cajolery but construction, not the placating of people but the carrying through of plans.” Politics was the place where useful morality and useful knowledge meet.
“He that drinketh his Cyder alone, let him catch his horse alone,” said Poor Richard. For Franklin there is not real tension between individual and society; they need one another. Both his individualism and his sociality inclined Franklin toward independence for the American colonies, but both inclined him in that direction slowly. During his long stay in England as what we today would call a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin’s individualism brought him to prefer the company of “writers and scientists, Scots and Dissenters,” not the British establishment. Parliamentary imperialism, whereby the House of Commons asserted the right to rule the colonists by law, “especially irritated” Franklin the individualist, enthusiast of self-help and self-rule for persons and peoples.
Franklin’s social nature undoubtedly resented the snubs of English ‘great men,’ but delighted in rumored praise from King George III, to whom Franklin tried to remain loyal while defending colonial independence from Parliament. Wright accurately calls Franklin’s conception, “a commonwealth of equal members,” not a “mother country with subservient dependencies,” and plausibly argues that a Parliament that had so recently wrested power from the throne would never permit the king to become the final arbiter of colonial affairs.” Franklin’s sociality also made any revolutionary doctrinairism as repellant to him as it was to his friendly acquaintance Edmund Burke. A born conciliator, he only began to speak in favor of American independence and republicanism in 1774. In the end, “a touch of Puritan iron” in his soul put an end to Franklin’s temporizing.
This led to the most useful political deed of a life devoted to utility: persuading France to give what in today’s terms were some 80 million dollars of aid to the American revolutionaries during the early, hard years of the war. “Without this, America might not have been able to maintain its independence after 1778.” While the French sought revenge for their defeat at British hands in the French and Indian War, some twenty years earlier, they also shrewdly and secretly proposed to the British a territorial settlement that would have blocked American westward expansion, and they were privately shocked at Britain’s eventual concessions in the peace treaty. Franklin’s diplomacy in France was aided by his charm, but abetted by the interests of his hosts, and also delimited by those interests. Utility is a game for any number of players.
Utilitarians may play well, as long as others are utilitarians. Franklin sometimes recognized that they are not, always. He predicted peace with the American Indian tribes, but only after their defeat. And on Quaker pacifists he noted: “I had some cause to believe that the defense of the country was not disagreeable to them, provided they were not requir’d to assist in it.” Still, he almost wistfully hoped for the adoption by rulers of some more utilitarian calculus than was usual. “An army is a devouring monster,” and “if statesmen had a little more arithmetic… wars would be less frequent.” He imagined that the existence of hot air balloons might render all countries defenseless, and thus pacific.
More seriously, when he commended thirteen virtues to the readers of his Autobiography, he omitted courage. He had Poor Richard say, “There are three great destroyers of mankind, Plague, Famine, and Hero.” As did Locke, he hoped peaceful commerce would replace war as the chief mode of international relations. And also like that great philosopher, he did not sufficiently anticipate or guard against the re-clothing of fanaticism in secular garb.
What he did see was the central part that what we now call ‘the media’ would play in modern politics. Not only did he use his printer’s apprenticeship to begin his self-education in political thought, he also understood how mastery of publicity via the printed page, distributed to masses of people, could serve not only as a catalyst for debate and a vehicle for conveying information, but as a means of shaping the reputation of a writer-politician. We talk today about those who ‘invent themselves’ or construct a ‘public image’; Franklin knew all about that, and did it better than almost any American, before or since. He made this second self into the face of the nation whose regime he helped to conceive and design.
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